 So Daniel Niles is here today. He came to participate in the workshop, but I wanted to take this opportunity so that Daniel can introduce some of his ideas to archaeologists, anthropologists, and beyond on the campus. Daniel works for the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature as associate professor. His background is geography, but I have to say I learned so much from him about how we conceptualize human-environmental interactions beyond ecological model. I think when I first met him in 2010, my brain was still functioning in a way that, OK, how can I use formal models to interpret anti-gatherer activities, subsistence, and settlement? And he was really the one who started to make me think, OK, how can I link what I'm doing to contemporary environmental issues? And I think with the help from other faculty members here, Meg, Christine, Lisa, who else is here, Bill is on the back. We've been having really good discussions on how to think about incorporating our experiences from the past to think about contemporary issues and to the future. And today's title of his presentation is Overlaping Falls, Thinking Material Culture and Environmental Knowledge. Please welcome Daniel. OK, thank you. OK, thanks so much, Junko. Wow. Yeah, thank you for the introduction and for the invitation. I'm really pleased to be able to be here. I learned also so much in Junko's project that I'm kind of shocked to hear that, which she learned from me, too, because I felt like I was getting education from the environmental history, the landscape histories, and the history of Japan, which I really didn't know very well before Junko came up and got really, I think, just a crash course in a bunch of really fascinating stuff that has just opened up my own thinking in a way which I probably never would have been possible otherwise. So it's really been an amazing experience. And there's a second thing which is that I now live and work in Japan, and that was never my plan. I just didn't have that in mind at all. And I think, too, I spent about three years in Mexico and Central America, and I kind of always assumed that I would be between California and there, because I'm originally from Berkeley. This was kind of in my part of the world, more or less. And I never really thought that much about Japan. But getting there and having now spent this time and kind of slowly importing my ideas from other places and from other parts of my other interests into the Japanese context, it's somehow I feel like I have been able to learn things there or to find things there that I think would have been really difficult to find in most other places, that you can see certain kinds of relationships, in particular the cultural and ecological relationships, with a kind of clarity in a way and a historical depth once you begin to get that lens, that it's just really fascinating. And it's part of the reason why Japanese Japan is such a, it's why Westerners fall so high and overheals in love with Japan, which I'm now kind of very skeptical about in some ways. But anyway, that you confront there in Japan, the idea that there's a modernity, the modernity that we kind of take for granted here, takes a very different form there. And you have to confront the culture. You have to confront culture in a way in which many times, I think, scientists here are oftentimes kind of, it's easy to kind of make culture an extra dynamic somehow, magic ingredient. And when you get the same people into Japan, immediately you have to confront the fact that culture is just everything. So that's the basics. Sorry, my favorite. Not really. So this paper has a couple of different roots, but it's really based in a chance that I had for a few years to be a member of the scientific committee of this small program within the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which was called the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems Program, or GEOUS for short. And GEOUS was a very kind of noble idea conceived by one man there. FAO is not famous for its support of small farmers, really. It's not famous for ecological perspective, although it's now doing a little bit more in that realm. It's really been one of the big supporters of kind of big ag distributions and facilitations. And nevertheless, within the FAO, this idea of the GEOUS, this Globally Important Agricultural Heritage, was an idea that we should have some designation kind of akin to the UNESCO World Heritage, World Cultural Heritage designation, for agricultural knowledge systems, for agricultural systems. And they decided that they would create this little marker and that they would go find places in which they thought that they were really high quality traditional agricultural systems. So you're talking about agro-biodeversity and food culture and livelihood, persistence through time, landscape services, depending on how you want to talk about it. All of these things which really couldn't be distinguished, really couldn't be separated one from the other. So you had to talk about kind of a cultural ecological whole there. And the problem with that was that we wanted, those of us who were on the committee in the FAO, we wanted to provide some kind of guidelines about once these places were designated, what to do then? How do you, what should a government, local government or state government or national government or the FAO in itself do in order to support these places? And we kicked that discussion around. It's not the most efficient institution, the FAO. But we kind of kicked that idea or the discussion around for a couple of years before it just hit me after having been to a bunch of these different sites that we were never going to answer that question until we had a really good idea of why these places were persisting through time first. Until we had an idea of what makes for cultural ecological persistence, we were never going to be able to design a policy which would really support places in their entirety as opposed to the kind of green logoing that we were oftentimes kind of default, proposing by default or supporting by default. And so that was the beginning for me of a totally different perspective and it happened to coincide largely with the time which Junko was at Santa Cruz, or sorry, was at Kyoto. Now, I also had in this time come across a woman, a New York woman artist who gave this amazing presentation in which she basically asked, how am I to understand the relevance of my cultural knowledge to the world today? Of all my people's experience, is it worth something today? Because apparently, we're kind of like possibly the stewards of these small territories. But there was no kind of sense that all of that cultural experience, all of that knowledge would have some active role in the world today. It just seemed totally kind of incommensurate to the big problems of climate change and the Arctic and all that. And she had this great phrase for kind of what she was trying to do in her work, which was to try to link between the hyperfuture and the super-ancient. And she then went on, Alison, to the Anchorage Art Museum where she made a two-month installation in which she was present in the museum called The Place of the Future Ancient, in which people would confront not only the artifacts of her peoples, but actually a real person and have to make all of these different exercises which she did. And I thought that she was really kind of onto something and addressing it in a really creative way. And at the same time, we have these very pressing concerns, very immediate concerns, very kind of techno-institutional scientific concerns about how to deal with things like climate change and nuclear waste and all this. And this is one of those signs which was created as a result of this immense social institutional process, trying to figure out what to do about signaling zone, signaling knowledge through time. And this is kind of the best we can get to. And after all of those panels, it was a proceedings of National Academy panel that eventually developed this kind of thing. So it was really supposed to be our best efforts. In fact, there's a documentary film about this in which people say, we've never had to do this type of communication to future generations before. And I just thought, wow, that's weird. It seems like as if there's been humankind have not been able to convey knowledge through time. It seems to me that they have indeed. And that we can come up with things like this which seem to me, I mean, I almost don't understand what that means. It's a bit strange. And then, all of you, I think, are familiar now having Junko here with this type of artifact. But I remember the first time that I saw this when I arrived in Japan, there was an archaeological project there. And I saw an image of this pot, I believe. And I just couldn't make head or tails of this thing. I just thought it was about the weirdest thing that I'd ever seen in a way. And yet, when you look at it, it's so laden with meaning. And I thought over time, what is the meaning? What is the knowledge that we lack that this thing has no significance for us? On the one hand, there seems to be an awful lot of knowledge, an awful lot of value, we can say, invested in this pot and a pot's like it. And on the other hand, we have this break in which it seems none of that somehow is transferred to us. So I began to focus more on material culture in general. As I thought, these things, we have to be able to do a little bit better with these. Now, this is nothing new to you, I think, that you are the archaeologist. So this is my kind of naive approach in a way to your field. But I hope that it won't be entirely naive as I go through. So if I kind of say, in a nutshell where I have come to in this presentation and in this paper, which is now kind of out for review and let's see what happens, is that we have in landscapes lots of environmental knowledge embedded, lots of particular cultural perceptions of the agencies of nature, I can say in the most general way, encoded in landscapes and also running through material and immaterial culture. And when we look at these objects, they have very material significances. They have metaphorical, allegorical, representational, and they also have very metaphysical significances. That is, they are just as material as they are immaterial, even though they are material. And this, to me, raises a question about how we understand the forms of knowledge out there in the world and the activities and patterns by which knowledge is conveyed through the generations. And finally, as I was just saying, of the significance of these types of knowledge to the present. And so today I want to talk about what I call the charcoal forest, in which I say charcoal, or try to discuss charcoal as an embodiment of particular understandings with agencies of the natural world. And that when you look a little bit closely at the production and the use of charcoal, you begin to see something about the structure of this knowledge. And especially on the areas that seem very important to me in which the qualities that are understood in one area of activity are transferred into another area of activity. And I'll try to explain what I mean by that. But I call those areas of transference in which knowledge developed in one domain of life is transferred or made available for another domain as an overlap. And these overlaps are really important because they link within a landscape activities which are separate and yet part of a whole. Not only are they separate, but once you watch the workings of the knowledge which is being transferred, you see that actually neither of them could exist, neither of these different areas of activity could exist without the other. So you have this kind of idea of mutual constitution. And this said some light on what I've just been talking about, this idea of how culture persists through time. So in Japan and in many other places, the Gia Sons, for example, they happen to be my favorite because they are designated. They've kind of been recognized. And you seem to get some added value in terms of the significance of your research for local communities. If you can say the local communities have got a designation, they've got international recognition, and they can take that, we always thought, as a lever essentially to start to improve the conditions, the policy conditions, their ability to discuss those things in public fora. So you see in Japan, but in other places, longstanding, diverse, complex cultural ecologies whose persistence has been poorly theorized, I think, in both human and ecological difference. And one of the key things that you see right away, and I think this is a huge problem for people in general when we start talking about heritage and tradition, is that it's assumed to have been some, so there was some past in which there was a tradition and that's how it was at a moment. Instead of there being essentially kind of continuous presence in which the past is also a present. So persistence, even if you talk about persistence of agricultural heritage zones over the course of 1,000 years, because some of them even have more time than that, you're not talking about a stasis, a cultural, ecological stasis, but instead, you can see persistence as evidence, as proof of the successful transmission of knowledge through successive generations. So in that sense, what I think is when it comes to questions of sustainability, and here I kind of get to my end, we're trying to invent now sustainability out of the ruins essentially of our last centuries of techno-scientific organization of the world, meanwhile ignoring, in my view, the lessons of the people who actually have proven sustainability in landscapes through time. And part of the problem that we can't see that is because we can't, part of the problem we can't recognize, the value of those sustainability is because we don't see the knowledge as knowledge. We see essentially relics, artifacts, et cetera. And this is because the knowledge of these places has not really often taken what we call formal form, but is instead embedded in practices, in artifacts and in patterns. So, and if we change our perspective about that, then we can see that we have lots and lots of data, lots and lots of access to knowledge in the form of all the classic artifacts, pottery and tools and textiles, house form, and seeds and foods and tastes even, as I will try to describe, and the related social practices, the beliefs, the local institutions. We can see these all as methods of conveying knowledge from past to future, including even the surrounding landscape and biomes. So to make this case, I basically draw up on three literatures and each of these we could discuss kind of at length and I think that would be really interesting, but probably we don't have enough time to really do that. So I kind of go through these pretty quickly and then I wanna show you a bunch of pictures of this place and talk about some of the graphics so that you can see kind of what I mean in terms of the real landscapes. But basically I found three literatures which I think are really interesting, each of them really rich and I think very compelling and provocative. The first one is the work is what we can call co-evolution or extended evolution and that's really based upon, there's a lot of people have written on co-evolution through time, but recently there have been Juergen Wren who is the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Manfred Laubichler who is Arizona State have written a couple of papers, three papers, proposing their approach, their idea of extended evolution or co-evolution which I described briefly. I have a reference list at the end of this paper if you're interested. And then so that is, they're developing as I say, a structural but not deterministic description of evolutionary change and I think that they do, that that's pretty interesting. The second is anthropological literature on the ontological and implicit ontological significance of culture, of cultural diversity and on that I really think of the literature that I'm aware, Philippe de Scola is really the, is one of the most interesting and he's got a really wonderful short six paragraph piece in which he lays out what he means by this kind of pluralistic anthropology and I read a little bit of that to you in a minute. And then there's material culture studies which is an enormous field as you all know much better than I and I've really kind of been around the edges except for the fact that I think there have been some very interesting developments in the last handful of years from people like Tim Ingalls, Pierre Limonier and other French who are kind of drawing on a different, they're turning material studies away from the study of artifacts, decorative artifacts and more into objects in relationship to what they say are currents of social activity or systems of thought and action. So trying to draw objects into this kind of deep context as kind of agents within that. So, co-evolution. If we kind of summarize out of their papers, the papers of Wren and Laudwickler, we can say kind of three major things. First, it's that they use, they talk about co-evolution in relationship to various entities, human and non-human and it's very interesting to see the way that they do that. But in terms of human societies, they say human societies transform their environments by means of their material culture and in doing so they create this niche that decisively shapes their evolution. Second, that human societies all have rules about what it is that people can and can't do. And from their perspective, cultural information is stored in those rules as well as in the material culture that supports them. So I'll come back to that idea in a second. But third, that the niche, and this is very important, extends the system itself by providing critical regulatory effects. That is that the system, the niche that's been created becomes essentially the locus for experience in which the evolution continues to unfold so that people are changing the environment in ways that reflect their preferences based upon what's around them. And then those preferences get essentially kind of become more available or become built in and that becomes the next locus for transformation. And while they're doing that, they're changing not just their environment but also their informational environment so that they have, as I said, this new locus of experience and a new potential source of change. So there's what they call essentially a process of externalization in which the activities of people are become essentially contextual and internalization in which context is brought into the culture itself or practices. So in terms of our understanding of niche, then we can say right away that niche is not something out there that's waiting to be inhabited but it's something that has to be created and filled. And then there's the very interesting element which is what we all know that constructed niches persist longer than any of their individual inhabitants. And that's really interesting. It means that something is being preserved between people. So the storage and the transference of important hereditary and regulatory information. That is, niches contain signals that later inhabitants can read and act upon. And when we're talking about signals, in my view, we're really talking about knowledge. And knowledge, we can say, can operate as a particle and a wave. That is, knowledge we all know is sets of ideas that we can communicate, that we can share through the air. But that also knowledge takes real material form. So Ryn and Laubickler talk about knowledge, first of all, as encoded experience. So it's a very pragmatic or we could say practical approach to the idea of what is knowledge. And they talk about it in terms of institutions. They talk about it in terms of rituals. There are all these ways in which people create to deliberately make people do things that a place or a people thinks is important. But then they have this line in this paper here, the rendas, in which they say, knowledge is not just a mental structure. It also involves material and social dimensions that play a critical role in determining what actions are possible and legitimate. And they go on to talk about material artifacts, such as instruments or texts. But we can do just as much by talking about material artifacts in terms of objects and seeds and other things. And then when you're looking at the persistence of cultural ecological, you have to say, but what is, what are we talking about when we're talking about knowledge? And this is where I think that Philip de Scola is so interesting because he says very clearly, we must give, I mean, that's not the right words, we don't give, but we must acknowledge the ontological integrity of cultural experience that people develop through these communities of practice, as I will just show to you, ways of determining what is and isn't in the world. So, as Scola says, human action, in particular places, is gradually stabilized through communities and practice, in which specific schemes of action and thought emerge, which imbibe the life we lead in common with observable coherence. We can see these operations as a sort of ontological sifting of the qualities of the world that impinges upon many aspects of human experience, such as the sorting of existing things into categories, the type of agency which with these existing things are credited and the nature of the relations they maintain, the way in which collectives are constituted and interact with other collectives. The definition of what an agent and a patient is of how a legitimate and effective action can be deployed, the conditions under which a proposition can be held to be true and knowledge to be authentic, et cetera. Okay, he's saying so clearly, and it seems to me eloquently, that when you are talking about, I mean, I'm guilty in a way of believing in holes, that there are kind of cultural collectives that are different in different places and that you can find them and think about them as holes. So I kind of spilled the beans on that from the very beginning, but here he is saying that the knowledge which is developed within these places is integral to those places. And that's really interesting, and I don't skip this, but there's been a very interesting reaction from Engel and a few others, I think, on how when you look at the material cultural realm, people have really missed that ontological element or epistemological element of things, of knowledge. And they have instead focused on what are essentially oftentimes descriptive or decorative elements without ever really getting at the significance of material. And without going in detail, this is from his book, The Perception of the Environment, and then he wrote another paper called Towards an Ecology of Materials, in which he says the same thing more or less. And the book has many more examples. It's, I find it very interesting and worth attention. So in Engel and others, then you say in material culture you have not simply practical decorative, but perception of internal qualities. And as I said before, this idea that objects represent knowledge systems. That is, as Descola is saying, represent reflections or represent ideas of what is out there, of how things can be known, of what relationship between this thing and other things are there that make it possible to exist. So here we return to that. Okay, this is my last wordy slide. So the overlapping idea. Here I'm going to introduce a little bit of carbon and charcoal, forest, kiln, and use. And each of these, as I said, involves a set of knowledge which is distinct from the other and yet also defining within. So that charcoal becomes both contingent upon and constitutive of other practices. Some material, some immaterial, some that directly have to do with charcoal and others which do not. And in this view, we see, I think, that these overlapping forms allow charcoal to be created and reconrated as an object of the past dependent upon the knowledge of the previous generations and yet always current in the landscapes and the ecologies and in the human experience that it represents. So, okay, finally. This is the place, these are the, this is a little model of the coastal hills of Wakayama prefecture in kind of central western Japan. And it's one of those Gia sites that was recognized a couple years ago. And it was recognized in large part due to this graphic which I redrew because it presented such a lovely depiction of the ecological interrelations of this little landscape. So basically what you have here is a mosaic forest, a coppice forest which I'll describe in just a minute, that lines basically the tops, the hill tops of these coastal mountain range. Along the mid slopes you tend to have plum orchards and most of the time some places you have different kinds of citrus production but plum is really the one that was recognized here. In the, at the edge of the forest you have people keeping bees, that little bee house which use this mosaic forest, this forest in multiple stages of succession as habitat for about 60 to 70% of their lives. They spend most of the time living in the forest except for in the early spring when the plum blossoms in these brilliant pinks and reds and the bees feast on the nectar of the orchards provide obviously a very important service. In fact, it's totally depends. So the plum orchard completely depends upon the bees, the bees depend upon the forest. These soils as we'll see in just a second are extremely rocky, what they call rudacious soils and they are just not very hospitable. They're essentially kind of like a compressed mud and they're just like a stony rock, a pebbly mud, I don't know how to say exactly. Anyway, nasty stuff is if you're a farmer there's nothing really that you could grow there except for things which have very deep root systems. The landscapes are very steep and pro to landslide. This area of Wakayama is experiences every year the brunt of the typhoon season which comes up. They have some of the highest single day rainfalls in Japan and Japan is a country which despite its small size about the size of California I believe receives twice as much rainfall as the entire United States. So this place really seems extreme weather and these people have maintained essentially what they're doing here is growing root systems to hold things in place. And in doing so they provide essentially a lot of downstream benefit as the water that collects instead of running off too rapidly kind of filters through this soil which has been nicely broken up and at the proper kind of contour they will build these little ponds. They will kind of dig out these little ponds. The water running downhill, groundwater will pool in that warm slightly and then run into the rice and other vegetable gardens that kind of line the lower slopes of these thin valleys. And then finally is used as irrigation for the main rice and vegetable crop which is down slope. But the plum in terms of the financial side of things it's really the main cash crop. So here let's take a little picture. Here we're in a coppice plot which has been trimmed about two weeks or about 10 days or something like that. Previous you can see that you've got these kind of stringy oak. This is the main species that these charcoal makers, colliers are interested in and they've trimmed and cleared everything all of this brown stuff is essentially whatever has been removed from this field. It's, you can't see it really from this angle but this is a very steep landscape. This is Masahaki Hara. He's the collier with whom I spent some time. He's really considered to be the best. He's really considered to be the best. And the best is measured in part by his ability to fire his kiln with the most different kinds of species of tree. So the idea that he can produce what's considered to be the best quality charcoal in the world no matter what variety it comes from. More varieties can put in go to his kiln than anybody else's. And he's a basically is a, technically he's a second generation although I think that they go back further. He did all of this work basically by himself. Here you can see, get an idea of the surrounding forest. This is something which has been in regrowth for probably, I don't know, eight or 10 years. And this is a road cut here but you can get a sense of how dense the forest would be otherwise. Just a sense of how steep it is if you can, if that gives any, uh-oh, uh-oh. If that gives any sense. Do you see these oak trees? Here a good look at the kind of the soil. This is really what you're dealing with there. It's just, there's just not much to go on. So it's really ready to kind of flow whenever it's exposed like this. So, yeah. So here you see what you, what you'll get there are these coppicing is a practice by which people repeatedly harvest from the same root base. And that's done around the world for firewood, for charcoal usually. And usually, at least in Europe, you find these trees which are composite about kind of human height and you'll see these trees which have this enormous girth and then this big kind of bulbous top and then these weird little kind of stemmy like trees coming out of the top. And those can live to be centuries old and even some of them apparently in Italy can be almost a thousand years old. But trees like this will basically grow indefinitely as long as they're harvested, apparently. So here's a look at the oak, the density of this wood which is really what's responsible for the special quality of the charcoal. Here's the kiln, haras kiln. It's really kind of an evocative place. I love to go there. Here we are looking into the kiln and just about the point of removal of the lengths of charcoal. And there you can see what happens there. Get break to the side here and then covered with this ash. The technique is particular to this place and I won't go into it in any real detail. But here you see this stuff. It's just like, this is 90 to 95% pure carbon. So when the kiln is smoking, you're not losing carbon to the air. If there's, I was like, oh my God, what is this place? They're smoking up the whole place. But actually what they're releasing are essentially the gases that represent the living matter of the tree and they're densifying the carbon structure of the thing so that what comes up here is this really kind of magical material which has lots of interesting properties. It's not like anything else you've ever really seen, I don't think. Really kind of interesting stuff. And this is what it will look like on a kind of a cold winter's day with the smoke coming through under the light coming through the canopy. So that, I was gonna show you that first graph if you can keep that in mind of the ecological relationships. That's the classic way in which this place is represented as essentially a series, a sequence, an ecological sequence. And that's a really nice way of describing what's going on there. And it helped, I think, this place to get designated as a Diaz zone. And yet it seemed to me totally insufficient as a description of the practices that actually create the place. And so if we think instead of these zones, these different zones here I have forest bees and orchard called out as essentially separate but mutually dependent knowledge domains, then we can think perhaps a little bit more creatively about what are the relationships that actually create this landscape. So you've got what I've kind of describing here is these vertical, which are the ecological kind of cause and effect, this kind of cascade of value. Each of these products, this charcoal is very high value. In fact, it's all bought up, you can't really get it. Unless you go there, you can find a few pieces but basically the whole, every kiln and you can get one, every month you can get about three loads of charcoal. They're bought up entirely and sold. It's very high value stuff, which I'll describe in just a minute. And then plums too are big cash crop. So you've got kind of high value products coming out of the landscape. And that's the kind of vertical ecological. But if we think perhaps on this kind of horizontal you really have to look at what happens in the forest and the kiln and the food. And here when you look it's very interesting because the metrics slip out. There are no longer got ecological measurements. The measurements by which you figure out what is happening by which people are measuring or measuring their activities become very flighty and they end up showing up in things like the smoke, in things like the color and the taste and the smell of this wood vinegar which is distilled in the charcoal making process. In finally in the taste of food which is grilled with these charcoal. The carbon charcoal burns according to the chefs the best. It puts out the best heat. It puts out the most even, the most steady, the most kind of heat like heat that you want. It's not a scorching heat. It's a dense rich heat that cooks food in the best way possible. So the main demand for this charcoal is in the very, very high end restaurants that specialize in grilling of eel and vegetables in Kyoto and Tokyo. In which basically the foods are cooked with almost no dormant salt and perhaps a little bit of the light sauces. But really the idea is that you're presenting to people food in its best, in its absolutely best cooked form and that is through this charcoal. So finally the quality of this charcoal is being judged by chefs and by people who are eating the food way out in the city, a distance away. And Hada, when you start to talk to him about what it is that he's doing he's constantly watching for these signals. The color of the smoke, the smell of the smoke, the color and the taste of this. And he's thinking about how he's going to get this and how this is going to translate into this. And he's even doing that when he is measuring his activities at the point of coppicing. Because the coppicing regime that he does happens over about a 15 year cycle. So he coppices his oak, he takes it, he fires it, he returns in about 15 years to the same plot and can re-harvest. But of course no one is telling him that, 15 years, now is the right time. 12 years, he has to understand that. He has to read, he has to have a sense of how what he believes is in the kind of discolors sense the agencies of nature, of how they're being gathered together on the hillside and being essentially captured by those trees and how he, with that knowledge, will fire them. So firing takes about eight to 10 to 12 days, all again based upon his assessment of what's happening in the kiln. So he's measuring this back and forward. I see my time is up. So in order to describe, rather than that ecological relationship, that kind of typical ecological model, this scientific illustrator and I who went to the field together a few times talked about how else we could represent it and this was kind of our first iteration. And I like it, it's not so bad, but it's the first one. So there, what we have tried to do is to show that essentially that in the activity with the land manager at the center, with the actor at the center, he is working across all of these different fields in which essentially watching how the value, how the nature, how the energies that he's interested in, the qualities that he's interested in are captured or are present at mountain in general, at the tree when he's harvesting in terms of the root system that he's really watching over the long term, how that has to do with the quality of the timbers that he's finally harvesting, of how they must be mixed in the kiln in order to fire properly, how the kiln can be managed by the signals in the color, the vinegar, the color, the smell, the smoke and finally how the proof of this charcoal is present in the cooking and the food up in the top. And so if we look at that landscape again and here I'm really gonna, this would be my last slide, if we look at this, we can begin to see that what Hara is doing is working across different, combining different kinds of knowledge that the charcoal knowledge or the charcoal forest is dependent upon, not only his own ecological knowledge of forest of topography, of all the kind of typical ecological relationships that he sees there and we're also talking about combinations of species and that I saw you have Anna Singh coming soon and she's been talking so brilliantly about the synergies, the symbiosis between different species and I think that this is exactly the type of context that she also is talking about in terms of the ecological side. There's all this, what we can call technical knowledge in terms of the tools, the techniques that are being used at the point of harvest and firing and then finally there's a lot of food knowledge and that's a really important part that normally doesn't get included in terms of as a driving factor in any kind of ecological description of the landscape but it's totally essential in terms of how people recognize the flavors, the proper flavors and that much it seems to me of what people are doing when they're discriminating between flavors at least in deep enriched food cultures is environmental, has to do with the conditions of growth and the qualities of plants and I will just say that if we were to look at these different domains you could see I think similar types of knowledge that all of them overlapping in interesting ways which I have not really investigated yet and that as a whole in a sense if you're really interested in that ecological cassette it's this overlapping within and between these different features that ends up giving this whole thing its value and this is essentially my proposal in this paper that the forms of environmental knowledge are all around but they're hidden from sight oftentimes that they show up oftentimes in these very fascinating ways in terms of tastes and smells and even things like color and other features which people within can read as signals of essentially affirming their sense of what is present and not present in the world around them so thank you very much some citations I realize it's one of you who need to go through the next part or whatever, please do so but that was such a fascinating presentation thank you I'm sure there are some other questions please so you're talking about the charcoal and who's purchasing the charcoal and what's it being used for I mean what's the whole because that's kind of the basis, the economic basis of that, can you just elaborate on that just very shortly because I'm fascinated about that yeah the charcoal is sold to there's a local kind of collective that buys all the charcoal from these different charcoal makers there are about 30 of these guys all men as far as I know and then there's a training center and these guys, these individuals will also take apprentices so there are people coming but basically the charcoal is sold to the restaurant tours they're the major market for this there's a small bit of kind of side market but really the best quality goes to the restaurants yeah, that's the main demand then you can see, if you look up Bin Chotan, which is the kind of generic name for this stuff you can find it, people are using it in water filters they're using it here and there and that is similar slightly different, but pretty close and that's being used and I think that there are probably a bunch of other kind of industrial uses for this stuff too sure, my pleasure related to that the use of charcoal you showed us how that is highly benefited by these expensive restaurants and we have to say Daniel is one of the two people who can make a reservation as Japanese for the next day I want to make an reservation tomorrow he's the only one who was able to do it apart from you, it's Sakamoto who is a well-known musician in New York so Daniel is very well connected with fancy restaurants but what I'm curious is I think what you presented is great that makes me realize I'm trying to get rid of all the categories but then I'm still thinking in a very categorical manner the last slide seems like after I've gone through I think I have two questions the first question is that it seems still like getting back to the ecological technical and cool categories in this slide so the reason why you showed that slide after I've gone through showing the holistic dimension question number one question number two is that that kind of traditional ecological environmental knowledge or practice that in terms of the common arts perspective I know that it's still value for the high priced restaurants and the high end of the circulation of consumption what's the relevance for the common arts life ways especially those living in a long time what's the relevance of the charcoal in particular no the importance of this holistic view to think about the life ways yeah yeah yeah yeah so the first question is why I divide into these terms because I was just trying to figure out how to talk about these different ideas I was trying to think about the kinds of knowledge once you get outside of our typical epistemological frame you live with very little to work with this is a problem you really can't see another epistemology as equal I think you always are judging it through this lens of which we have this is just the way that we think but that's a big problem because it doesn't get at as I was trying to say here the personal or the cultural logic behind the creation of things and described in terms of this other logic so the TEKA thing is really guilty of taking a specific crop for example charcoal or the oak trees that are used there and saying you know you've got all these medicinal values the local people say you've got medicinal values there so you extract whatever it is and try to figure out what is the property which gives the medicinal thing and although you may indeed be able to isolate that property what you're missing is the contextual and the logic all the knowledge which is behind essentially the creation and the recognition of that that fact that we treat as fact so this was just my attempt in one way to to divide to try to talk about the different kinds of knowledge which might be at work and frankly in the middle I thought because ecological is so we recognize ecological knowledge so easily although people like Anat Singh make that much more confused about the cause and effect and essentially the model that we use to understand ecological relationships and food knowledge is also kind of these days lots of people are talking about food knowledge but then the technical knowledge too is more I think more in terms of the French material culture studies people who are much that who's because on there about gesture and body and how that ends up being a really important part of knowledge as well and I just wanted to say that there is no one realm of knowledge that was inherently more important or superior to the other and that's why I just grasped at these three categories but then the second one this really comes down to what's the significance of this type of knowledge for local people it's not my question in terms of that kind of knowledge in terms of applying it to understanding everyday life as opposed to a fancy charcoal making I know it's I see this kind of practice as a whole among commoners in rural parts of Japan but it's much more rather than to make fancy charcoal or something that is seen traditional so-called traditional college for knowledge is not in fancy expensive charcoal but more of everyday life or preserving mountain veggies which is not expensive and I think that's the part that is really relevant in terms of what you're talking about but often the examples tend to come up with really fancy something that can be seen that can be labeled sometimes mistakenly as culturalist I'm in danger of being there is a question about isn't this a very extreme example and it is on the one hand but I think that it's not in the other in the sense that if you I think that you can go to other places and find other products that would be or other cities that would be just as rich with knowledge it's just that this happened to be one which was relatively close to me once I began to think about wow this is a really nice example but charcoal making in general is one of many forest management strategies used across different areas of Japan and they don't tend to produce this really high quality charcoal as you say but still do and I think that as having also the ability to have these kind of overlaps it's just that they may not be as kind of commanding those the charcoal in those situations may not be as in a kind of have such a a weight within the place the way that this one really does because really if you think about it they could bring in pollinators but the charcoal forest that mosaic forest it's the source of the pollination on which the rest of the community entirely depends and so these colliers are up there providing this incredible service to everybody else and totally out of view basically people know that it's important to different degrees just the way that the bee people know that the forest is important and the Ume people know that the bees are important and that the forest is important but they don't really specialize in that so this is just an interesting way in which you could really look at the instrumental value you can say of one very specific practice across this whole landscape so thank you I've been having the same thoughts about other people's knowledge outside of western perspective and one of those things that I thought in your speech is that there's a table in there and this whole idea of alienation and would you state to how people value this charcoal as high value is that really about price or about the value of the knowledge is it is there a key difference there does it get transformed the value of knowledge gets transformed into intrinsic price is there some kind of alienating process there that happens well I think yes and no I mean when we think about charcoal knowledge who's the one sorry hold on one second can I just following this one oh yeah great yeah sure oh really oh really really great and I want to talk to you about the concept of landscape learning which I don't know if you're familiar with but it's been something I've really caught on to in our analogy ever in deep prehistory and yeah it's fantastic talk thank you we'll be around after this I don't know what time you're here ooh that's bad but can I write to your email yeah through the weekend until Monday I go back to Japan yeah be great thank you okay sorry very sorry about that you know same talks about the story of mushrooms from the point where it gets to where they're sold in restaurants it seems that people kick particular mushrooms in a certain way that they can be recognized by the paper and so in order to alienate them they're sorted over and over and over does that happen to you? no I think it's really different because here okay who values the charcoal knowledge the color really himself they think this stuff is really deep and if you talk to them about it you try to say in fact there's in which we ask this guy so why is your charcoal so good what is it that you've got that you're doing that's so different and he kind of blanched for a minute and then he went and he said it's the trees and he was kind of very humble in that way and I wasn't very satisfied with that in a way because I thought there was a bit there was more there was true I was glad that he told me that much but other than he who has spent now apprentice under his father said his father was a really difficult teacher had to learn really really well tries to teach other people and can't get them to learn how to do this stuff well so he thinks this knowledge is really important and really deep but not that many other people the charcoal users out there in the restaurants they appreciate the food and the flavor but I think that that's essentially a proxy in a sense it's not really them talking about his knowledge even they're not valuing his knowledge directly personally they don't think oh gosh why aren't we lucky we have that collier out there not the way that people tend to do with a good farmer at least in some places aren't we lucky we have this really brilliant farmer so the knowledge is actually undervalued in terms of the cultural significance of it these guys are kind of out there like shadows in the forest the only thing is that because that high end demand means that he can make good money the collier so he gets an affirmation as long as he's making that really good as long as he's doing well by his forest management and his kill management he makes a really good living so that's the signal that's interesting to him aside from the fact that this stuff is really that he really likes it he likes doing his work he's really fascinated by it but he gets paid well do others think otherwise if they're not making it well apparently there are this certain number about 30 who are doing essentially in this specific region this this practice and there is some of the same variety of oak trees growing in coastal hills in different prefectures but I've never gone to see the charcoal there and I don't really know about the market conditions I have the feeling because I think that much when the when the charcoal is bought up by this kind of middleman I think that oftentimes it could be mixed together so that there's high standard but that it's not it's not like this guy's charcoal goes to this restaurant in particular so I think that there's a kind of generalization that happens there at that level yeah at the sorting but the value that he gets is still really high and among the colliers he's known to be just he's the one that gets that writes the when the when the state partly this is a social network but when the the town wants to promote for example this man this technique of managing forest he's the one who writes the guides he's really he's considered even as one guy said as a kind of local hero so it's kind of unusual I think it's not so not so alienated and I've the thing of the valuation out there and this other world to me that doesn't that seems like a kind of that to me I kind of like that part of the story in a way because we don't have to define this purely localized you know these absolutely you know kind of autonomous or charcoal zones you know in order to think about cultural survival or cultural persistence you know you don't have to do not everything has to be right there on site but if you can you can you sell products out there to most farmers are trying to sell their stuff out there you know they want markets so you know the idea that you have to kind of somehow have this at least intellectual prescription about what's a proper range for people to sell their territory their products and it becomes very difficult and this example I like the way that you've got this very traditional knowledge it seems interfacing with this very you know it's Japan it's the big economy it's the modern country it's all that and so you know the farmers are trying to make a living within that economy so let you know what are the relationships by which that may or may not be possible it's kind of the way I approach it alright I talked a lot thank you thank you